Essays on non-virtual reality #161

Lieutenant Colonel Francisco de Melo Palheta must have been a fine-looking man, and one helluva smooth talker. In 1727, the Viceroy of Brazil, Vasco Fernandes César de Meneses, was asked to mediate a border dispute between Dutch Surinam and French Guiana on the northern coast of South America. He sent de Melo Palheta as his emissary to sort it all out, but also gave his young officer a special, additional assignment. Although the dispute between the two countries was satisfactorily addressed, the Governor of Guiana refused Brazil's request to share a few of its coffee plants. At the time, the French and the Dutch had a lock on the rapidly developing European coffee market and were none too eager to provide Portugal a wedge into the trade. As the legend goes, the resourceful Palheta, um, found his way into the affections of the Governor's wife. On parting she gave him a beautiful bouquet of flowers, within which she had secreted a small packet of fertile coffee seeds. With its ideal growing conditions — and massive population of African slaves — by the mid-1830s, Brazil was producing 30% of the world's coffee. It's an interesting story how the French and Dutch came to be growing coffee in South America in the first place. That tale begins with another legend situated in 9th Century Ethiopia. The story of Kaldi the goat-herder is probably apocryphal, but it's a celebrated fable that is still told throughout Northern Africa and the Middle East. Kaldi noticed that his goats became hyperactive after eating red berries from a certain small tree growing in the country's mountainous highlands. He shared the discovery with the head of the local Sufi monastery who had trouble staying awake during his lengthy evening prayers. The holy man prepared a hot infusion from the berries' roasted seeds, making the world's first cup of Joe. Problem solved, and word of Kaldi's remarkable berries spread. It is at least true that Coffea arabica, the most commonly grown coffee tree, did originate in the interior high plateau region of Ethiopia. But the earliest solid evidence of a coffee-drinking culture comes from 15th century Yemen. Still, by mid-16th century, it was already being widely grown in Persia, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey. The Dutch were the first to cultivate the plant outside of the Middle East (after smuggling out seeds from Arabia). Following initial failures to grow the finicky plant in India, they had managed, by the early 1700s, to establish successful plantations on several of their island holdings in Indonesia. For some reason, in 1714 the Mayor of Amsterdam, presented a single young coffee plant to King Louis XIV of France. (I can't figure out why. The King had on repeated occasions tried to take the Netherlands through both war and diplomacy.) The King had the sapling planted in the Royal Botanical Garden and would allow none but his gardeners near it. Nine years later, Gabriel-Mathieu Francois D'ceus de Clieu (I'm sorry, but I just can't resist these rambling, drawn-out names of old), a naval officer stationed on the Caribbean Island of Martinique, requested a shoot from that plant. By his own account, after King Louis XV (who was then all of 14 years old) refused his request, Gabriel snuck into the royal garden one night and stole a sprig from the plant which he carried back to the Caribbean, braving drought, killer storms, and pirates along the way. Although most histories of coffee credit de Clieu with having introduced coffee to the New World, it had been grown in the French colony of Saint-Domingue since 1715 and in the Dutch colony of Surinam since 1718. Nonetheless, genetic studies do suggest that virtually all of the coffee trees currently in cultivation throughout Central and South America are descendants of that one shoot pilfered from Le Jardin Royal des Plantes Médicinales in 1723. In May of 1773, the British Parliament passed the Tea Tax Act which was followed, in short order, by the Boston Tea Party of December and the Revolutionary War of 1775-1783. The Americans' patriotic rejection of British tea played a significant role in the popularization of coffee as the new country's morning-wake-me-up of choice. Of the 120+ species in the genus Coffea, just two comprise almost all of the world's production of coffee beans. The lion's share, some 60-70% are Kaldi's Coffea arabica (of which there are over 120 varieties grown today). Almost all of the remaining 30-40% belong to one or two of the varieties of Coffea canephora (Robusta coffee). In my next column, I'd like to explore a bit of the biology and psychology underlying the reason the tiny beans have become, after crude oil, the second most sought after commodity on the planet. Baker is professor emeritus of biology at Heidelberg University.